There's currently only one phone supporting T-Mobile's new rural Band 71, but that will hopefully change very soon. At Qualcomm's 4G/5G summit in Hong Kong today, the company announced a new set of chips designed to let smartphone makers speed up their Band 71 support.

Band 71, also known as 600MHz, is T-Mobile's $8 billion bid to match or exceed Verizon when it comes to rural coverage. Formerly used for TV channels 32-51, Band 71 is great for covering long distances over less populated areas, and for penetrating into suburban buildings. It's not going to make a big difference in T-Mobile's core urban areas, but once it's built out, it'll knit together the missing pieces of the carrier's national network.

Qualcomm's new chips are pretty technical; they're known as the "RF front end," and they're amplifiers and tuners designed to connect a physical antenna to a phone's modem. But the key is that they let devices with 700MHz antennas, which are common, connect to the 600MHz network. Qualcomm is announcing components that work with processors all the way from the bottom-of-the-line, feature-phone Snapdragon 205 to the premium Snapdragon 835.

"This basically allows an OEM to reuse their existing 700MHz antenna, but, with antenna tuning, allow it to pick up 600MHz signals," said Sherif Hanna, Staff Manager of Product Marketing for 4G and 5G at Qualcomm.

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At the moment, the LG V30 is the only phone with Band 71 support, and it uses some of Qualcomm's components, Hanna confirmed. T-Mobile only promises one more Band 71 phone this year; it's anticipated to be a version of the Samsung Galaxy S8 Active, so, like the V30, it's going to be expensive. The real potential of this new Qualcomm chipset is to get 600MHz support into low-cost handsets from Alcatel, ZTE, and the like.

T-Mobile has time to implement this. While the carrier is being really aggressive about rolling out 600MHz, it has to wait for existing TV stations to clear the airwaves in many parts of the country, and a lot of that action will be happening in 2018 and 2019.

"It'll be in the spring crop of smartphones. At least some of the OEMs will be using it in the first half of 2018," Hanna said.

About the Author

PCMag.com's lead mobile analyst, Sascha Segan, has reviewed hundreds of smartphones, tablets and other gadgets in more than 13 years with PCMag. He's the head of our Fastest Mobile Networks project, hosts our One Cool Thing daily Web show, and writes opinions on tech and society.
Segan is also a multiple award-winning travel writer. Other than ... See Full Bio

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